The short answer is, give them the answer, but also try to engage them into a discussion about what the answer means, and perhaps also into a meta-discussion about how they should be looking for answers.

On other fora (not necessarily PM, yay), I've seen people get more annoyed with meta-discussion and think they're even more superior/preachy/etc. than "teacher questions" - although I tend towards "The answer to your question is X; Y reference would have told you the same", and have had decent results.

One of the things I love about going to Perlmongers meetings

You lucky sod, to have Perlmongers meetings to go to! :)

I hope that the people that are attracted to programming are the ones who want to tinker, explore, find stuff out and get their task done. And I hope that means they'll want the answer, but they'll also be interested in the background, and also want to know how to ask question in the future. And that means discussion. So that's a vote for the Socratic method.

Absolutely concurred - although there are enough people who are concerned firstly with "getting task done" that they'd be annoyed by discussion before answers. Oh well.

[Your Mother]:Americans are still pumping out video games where you get to slaughter as many Germans as you have the GPU for... It has always struck me as odd that this particular case seems fine to people. :\

[Your Mother]:I like it. I tottered on going into hucksterism because I feel like the world deserves it.

[LanX]:he ... we have a movement here called Anti-Germans based on this

[Corion]:Your Mother: I think that's because (in the west) the Nazi-Germans are recognized as universally evil. Of course, you could do some number games to calculate other measures of evil than "historic losers of second world war" to come up with other evils:)

[Corion]:I've heard "Troll" described as the new Punk, and in a way, it can be as destructive as living the Punk lifestyle, and you don't have to sit out in the cold...